


The Borderlands

by vonnsguts



Category: Da Vinci's Demons
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Road Trips, Surreal, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:29:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5083114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vonnsguts/pseuds/vonnsguts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The air shimmers as heat rises off the pavement, and in the distance, something winks in the bright sun. It is the sea, waves lapping like tongues against a sliver-beach of fine white sand, and when Riario rolls down the window, the air is clean, and salty. Matted dune grasses slump on the gentle slope up from the beach to the packed red-clay dust that surrounds them in every other direction, that they have been driving through since Whenever. The crumbling highway leads up to the lip of this slope, and then ends. Only the water spreads out before them. Leo taps the brakes slowly and they crawl to a stop. Everyone is silent. </p><p>"I didn't know we were near the ocean," Zo finally says, leaning forward with his elbows on the front seat shoulders. </p><p>"We're not," Riario says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Borderlands

**Author's Note:**

> This work is primarily inspired by blackwalled's tag [modern dvd aesthetic](http://blackwalled.tumblr.com/tagged/modern+dvd+aesthetic). Also by the gothic meme, the ennui of long road trips, the tv show Life on Mars, and the creepiness of wide open spaces. 
> 
> *I wrote most of this before season three aired; it's not influenced by episode four.

When Riario opens his eyes again, they are parked at a gas station next to one of the pumps, and the car is empty. To the left, the narrow thread of road sprawls on; ahead, there is nothing but the flat, baked earth, and the hard, unbroken line of the horizon, where the sky comes to kiss the ground. It is a red land, and dry. When the winds scream out along the plains, the car shakes, and dust is blown up against the windows. Everything is coated in dust. For now, the world is tinged blue, as it is after you've closed your eyes for too long in the sun. 

He does not sit up right away, lets his head remain rested against the window. Through it he can see part of a neighboring pump, and a flaking convenience store with a wooden porch. A man is sitting there under the awning, looking at the car, his face broad and grim, his eyes like a weighted scale. Riario turns his head a little more. Leo comes out of the store, and lopes to the car, a few bottles of soda and a plastic bag in his hands. The man on the porch lifts his head a little, and a woman with long black braid appears from around the corner of the building to watch them too. When the sunlight shifts, the man's face appears to be beaten gold, and the woman seems to have wings. 

Then the door clicks open and Riario hears Leo settle into the drivers seat, the rustle of a wrapper and the fizz of a bottle opening. Nico and Zo are stepping out onto the store's porch, chattering animatedly with each other. 

"Got you something," Leo says. Riario stirs slowly, and turns away from the window. The artist presses a battered apple into Riario's palm. He stares at it. 

"Did you run it over with a truck first?" The apple is quite bruised, but Riario closes his hand around it, anyway.

"You could try being grateful, you know. It was the only fresh fruit they had." Leo sounds annoyed, but his eyes are twinkling. 

The back doors open, and Zo sprawls across the seats, filling the space with himself and his talk, until Nico shoves him into one corner. 

"—If you ask me, it's overrated" Nico is saying.

"I don't recall asking you," Zo snipes back, "and there are many overrated things in this world, but a cold, refreshing PBR is not one of them." He slaps the back of Leo's headrest. "Start the car, driver, this shit hole is giving me the creeps." 

Leo gives him the finger, and then they go.

 

.

 

The clock on the dash is five minutes behind the watch on Riario's wrist, which stopped working sometime after the last town they passed through, which was on a Sunday, because he saw the paper for sale. No one remembers when they left. Leo grinds his teeth and mutters to himself and drives too fast, not that they have ever once seen a cop car. Zo bitches, jokes too badly and too often, and eats large cellophane bags of chips, which he crinkles because he knows Riario hates the sound. Nico is rational, because he is scared. Riario is mostly silent. 

For the most part, they are alone. Occasionally, a car will whisk by them, the driver obscured by sun or dust, and they will see cities in the distance that never grow closer. Leo tells them about the phenomenon of mirages, but the cities's lights are still visible at night, and when the sun comes again, they are gone. 

When it is not his turn to drive, Riario stares listlessly out at the wide open, or sleeps long blurred hours that meld the days together. Once, he wakes up and the sky is aflame against the outlines of looming mountains which he has never seen before, or sees again. Another time, he wakes, and Leo is fussing with the map, and the radio is sawing pop music and static, and as he closes his eyes again, Zo is saying  _you're fucking useless with directions_. He wakes up, and they're sliding through a town with flickering neon lights that say "pray," instead of "open." He wakes up, and Nico asks him why he sleeps so much. 

 

.

 

Night in the desert is thick and encompassing. The car's headlights form a meager tunnel, but as they drive, the dark runs beside them, shadows pulling at the edges of the beams. Zo and Nico are asleep, or pretending to be. In the passenger seat, Leo is subsumed in a heavy, brooding silence, jiggling his leg up and down. Riario watches the road.

Finally, Leo shifts restlessly. "We should've gotten there by now," he says. 

 _Where_ almost comes out, but one knot in Riario's ribcage says he should know, and another knot — the one that has been hounding him the whole journey, because _this is important, where they're going, what they're after, this will change the world_ — agrees.

"Is there a deadline?" His voice is sly and supercilious, because it is all he has left. 

Leo snorts. "Well, what do you suggest we do if we get there and it's gone?" His irked impatience rankles Riario, who is suddenly irritated too.  

"What do you suggest we do if it never existed in the first place?" 

 A pause. "I don't know," Leo says, softer, stranger. 

Riario looks at him this time. The dim artificial glow from the dashboard radio has darkened the shadows under Leo's eyes, and cut out his cheekbones, and his gaze is like soft, black water. Wordless, Riario turns back to the road. There's something standing on the yellow dotted line, large and sleek and four legged, with a huge tan hide.

He slams on the brakes, the steering wheel shuddering under his hands and the car fishtails hard, skidding to a stop. Leo shouts, bracing himself against the car door and the arm rest. The creature darts off road, bounding like a deer, only it isn't, and disappears into the night. Riario watches it go, breathing hard around the cold knife of surprise and clarity that has been shoved in his gut, his heart under his tongue. 

"What the _fuck_ is going on?" Zo has woken up. No one answers him. Leo dry washes his face. Nico's hand is on the back of Riario's seat, and his eyes in the rearview mirror are wild and questioning. Riario is still watching the spot where the animal, if it was an animal, had vanished. 

Leo's looking at him now too. "Something wrong?" he asks, too lightly. 

Riario blinks. "There was an animal in the road. Did you want me to hit it?" 

A very long silence. 

"I must not've seen it." Leo's voice is as careful as glass, and a thread of rage spikes in Riario. "What kind of animal was it?" 

"A deer," Riario cuts out with his teeth. He straightens the wheels, and taps the gas peddle a little too hard. The car jumps jerkily forward, jolting them all in their seats before it settles. 

"Nutter," Zo says, loudly. Riario's fingers flex on the leather of the steering wheel. He can feel Leo's eyes still on him, but he watches the road. 

"You can't even manage a straight line," Nico ribs Zo, eyes flicking to the rearview mirror again.  

"I am a very accomplished driver, thank you."

"With a revoked license." 

They carry on the charade for a few minutes more, before lapsing into silence. Later, when the others are asleep again, Leo glances sideways at him. It is the only way Leo looks at him now. 

"I can take over, if you want," he offers. Riario doesn't respond.

 

. 

 

On another day, a little after one in the afternoon, storm clouds begin to gather out of the North West. By two thirty, the rain is torrential. The windshield becomes a sheet of flowing water, the headlights fracturing off the droplets and obscuring the road. When they come to a patch of standing water, Leo swears through his ground teeth, flicks on the flashing emergency lights, and nudges the car to the side. 

"Jesus."

For a few minutes, they listen to the ticking of the light signals, the crackling radio, the angry shudder of rain. A fork of lightning splits open the dark, and then disappears.  

"Did you know," Nico starts, "if you count the seconds between a rumble of thunder and a bolt of lightning, you can tell how many miles away the storm is?"

"Or," says Zo, "or, you could look out the fucking window and see where the storm is."

The mood in the car is already sour and grows more so. Riario hears Nico mumble a low _fuck you,_ and a thump as the boy throws himself hard back against the seat. Zo tch's and Leo is drumming his fingers and jerking his knee, muttering about a delay. Riario only tunes out the irritation, his cheek cradled in his hand, elbow on the side of the car door. 

Another finger of lightning, but the light is thrown onto the thick trunks of enormous trees that scrape the sky's belly. They are sitting in a jungle grove. The trees are full and draped with creepers that are flowering wide, vibrant petals. The underbrush is dense with strange plants with hungry leaves shaped like cupped hands to catch water. A bird screeches somewhere out of sight. Sweat beads on Riario's brow and the back of his neck, from the heavy humidity that now blankets them. Then the light vanishes. When the lightning hits again, further away, there is only the flat, unbroken plain. 

When the rain thins out, Leo puts the car in drive and eases it back onto the road. It's several miles before anyone speaks. 

 

. 

 

The air shimmers as heat rises off the pavement, and in the distance, something winks in the bright sun. It is the sea, waves lapping like tongues against a sliver-beach of fine white sand, and when Riario rolls down the window, the air is clean, and salty. Matted dune grasses slump on the gentle slope up from the beach to the packed red-clay dust that surrounds them in every other direction, that they have been driving through since Whenever. The crumbling highway leads up to the lip of this slope, and then ends. Only the water spreads out before them. Leo taps the brakes slowly and they crawl to a stop. Everyone is silent. 

"I didn't know we were near the ocean," Zo finally says, leaning forward with his elbows on the front seat shoulders. 

"We're not," Riario says. 

"What are those?" Nico asks. All of them have been caught in the vast, sudden, impossibility of this ocean that at first, Nico's question is incomprehensible. Leo sits up straighter, brows furrowing. Riario follows the boy's line of sight. He's not looking at the water, but at the beach, where something has been left for them. 

They get out. Down on the white sand, four gold balloon letters held down by tiny weights jump and dance in the breeze coming off the water. The letters spell out a word. 

"'Hell,'" Leo says dryly, eyebrow arched. 

Nico grimaces. "That's not creepy at all." 

Zo snorts. "Bit underwhelming, isn't it?" But Leo has already started down to the beach. Riario follows him. They track streaks of red dust into the white sand, which squeaks underneath their steps and spills into their shoes. Leo inspects the balloons, fingers fluttering like agitated birds, but Riario looks at the sea, his lungs light with the salt smell. There is something else in the air, too, something metallic, something smoky. The waves break gently on the beach in hypnotic, perfect rows that he wants to walk into and slip under to see the sunlight shatter on the water from below. It is only when he feels a hand on his forearm that he looks away. 

Leo is balancing on one foot, picking at the tie of his shoe and stabilizing himself on Riario. When he's noticed, Leo gives a tight, sly, sideways smile.

"You want to know what's next, don't you?" Leo asks, finally undoing the laces. The taste of blood floods into Riario's mouth, and he breathes fast through his nose. It pours up from his throat, hot and coppery, coating his teeth until he nearly vomits. Then it dissipates. He pulls out of the press of Leo's hand, ignores the artist's huff of annoyance. A tiny itch tickles along his inner wrist, and absently, he rubs at it. Leo's sat on the ground, one shoe and sock off. 

"Oh, going for a swim, are we?" Zo says, from where he's laid down on the sand, affecting boredom. "A dip in the lake of fire?" 

"I'd say 'race you', but it wouldn't be much of a competition," Leo replies absently. Nico tugs warily at one of the balloons, which only continue to bob placidly. 

"Say that again after I've lapped you a few times." But Zo hasn't gotten up from the sand. Leo tugs off his other shoe and sock, and stands.  

"Does this strike anyone else as really stupid idea?" Nico asks. 

Leo steps into the water. The itch has spread along Riario's inner forearm and he scratches at it again, but it simply throbs, and when he pulls up the sleeve of his shirt, nothing is there. 


End file.
